Diversity at Nashoba Brooks School
One of the school’s core documents, “Diversity at Nashoba Brooks School,” supports our shift in curriculum: “In educating our students about the world, we must continually remind them and ourselves that most of the world is very different from Concord, Massachusetts.”
To ensure that diversity is included in new projects and units at the time they are developed, teachers confer with each other, the Diversity Coordinator, team members, and other members of their department. For an existing project or unit, they develop transformed lessons that focus attention on diversity.
For example, the Facing History and Ourselves unit has an art component that calls for designing and building a model of a monument to an event, a person, or an idea that a student feels strongly about. Originally students were introduced to an overview of monuments throughout time, many of which were Eurocentric examples. The focus has changed over recent years to look more deeply at Maya Lin’s monuments to the Viet Nam War and Civil Rights. A video about Maya Lin provides the example of this young Asian woman in a mostly white man’s military world and includes news footage of the hearings for the Washington, D.C., memorial. For girls in our upper grades, this offers a powerful story about the determination to have one’s voice heard.
Diversity at Nashoba Brooks encompasses differences in racial, ethnic, and religious heritage; socioeconomic background; family structure; sexual orientation; and learning style. Students learn within in a rich, educationally diverse environment that gives them insight into different peoples and diverse lives and traditions.
A parent of Nashoba Brooks graduate writes, “Jessica is currently in South Africa on a month-long Stanford seminar examining the country's situation a decade after apartheid. Her postings have all been eye-opening, but I see a person who is slowly figuring out where she wants to put her energies in this world. I have Nashoba Brooks to thank in large part for her curiosity, extreme confidence to explore new worlds, and intellectual capacity to know that these problems run deep and it will take many, many people, from all the disciplines, to work towards lasting solutions.”
